New York City, USA

United States

New York City holds the largest Italian-American population in the United States, and it shaped the way a whole country eats pork. Between 1880 and 1924, around four million Italians landed at Ellis Island, most of them from the south: Sicily, Campania, Calabria, Puglia, Basilicata. They crowded into tenements in Lower Manhattan's Little Italy, East Harlem, the Bronx along Arthur Avenue, and pockets of Brooklyn like Bensonhurst and Williamsburg. The pork butcher, the salumeria, came with them. By the 1910s, family-run shops were grinding pork with fennel seed and hot paprika behind marble counters on Mulberry Street and 187th Street in the Bronx, stuffing it into casings on the same day it was sold. The American supply chain changed the recipes. Italian immigrants had access to more pork, more lean cuts, and more spice than most of them had ever cooked with back home, and the sausages grew fattier, coarser, and fennel-forward. Pepperoni, a dry-cured salami seasoned with paprika and cayenne, was invented here around the 1910s or 1920s and has no direct counterpart in Italy. Italian sausage in links or bulk, sweet or hot, became the standard for the Sunday gravy that simmered in Italian-American kitchens from the 1930s onward. The old shops are still running. Faicco's in the West Village has been grinding its own sausage since 1900. Esposito's Pork Store on Court Street in Carroll Gardens has been there since 1922. Calandra's in Newark and Arthur Avenue Retail Market in the Bronx still sell fresh sausage by the pound to home cooks who learned from their grandmothers.